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UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 197-i House of COMMONS MINUTES OF EVIDENCE TAKEN BEFORE EDUCATION AND SKILLS COMMITTEE Monday 12 January 2004
NATIONAL SKILLS STRATEGY: 14-19 EDUCATION
MR CHRIS HUMPHRIES CBE and PROFESSOR ALISON WOLF Evidence heard in Public Questions 1-62
USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT
Oral Evidence Taken before the Education and Skills Committee on Monday 12 January 2004 Members present Mr Barry Sheerman, in the Chair Mr David Chaytor Valerie Davey Jeff Ennis Mr Nick Gibb Paul Holmes Helen Jones Jonathan Shaw ________________ Memorandum submitted by City and Guilds of London Institute Examination of Witnesses Witnesses: Mr Chris Humphries, Director General, City and Guilds of London Institute and Professor Alison Wolf, King's College London, examined. Q1 Chairman: May I welcome Professor Alison Wolf and Chris Humphries to our deliberations? We have only just started looking at a whole range of issues in the skills area. This Committee has been away from the skills sector for a long time and we thought it was appropriate, what with the Government's current interest in 14-19 and the new White Paper on Skills that we should be looking at a similar area to see whether we could add value. To that end, we had a briefing from the department last week and now we thought what better way to start than by inviting the two of you. Both of you are known for your excellent contributions in this area, but also for your very strong opinions and that is what we want. Let me start with a question to you, Chris. You are now involved with City and Guilds which has been around for a long time and has been celebrating its long history. Here you are, head of an organisation which has been there for a long time with a strong responsibility for imparting skills in our society, yet we are by all accounts a failure in terms of imparting the relevant skills to generations of young people. Do you feel guilty about this? City and Guilds has been around but it has not been very effective. Mr Humphries: In part, would be the true answer to that question. I would look back at the history of City and Guilds and say that yes, I suspect we missed some key issues over the years and I would also look back and look at the mix of decisions between government and City and Guilds over the years and ask whether policy and practice necessarily work hand in hand. I give you an example. One of the criticisms of the system is that there is an over-abundance of qualifications and confusion in the marketplace. Until around 1970, there were really only three or four awarding bodies operating in the field, the main ones being City and Guilds and RSA, and the decision to split those bodies and create a multiplicity of bodies was in fact the government's of the time and against the will of City and Guilds. I could point to quite a number of policy decisions over the last 30 or 40 years which fit into that category. To what extent would I say I feel guilty from City and Guilds' point of view? I think City and Guilds did not fight hard enough. I think they should have stood by what they believed in rather than rolling over or at least should have fought harder and stood up for the needs and interests of the employers and trainees whom they are meant to serve. In that sense, did the organisation serve the UK well by fighting against things it did not believe in? Probably not. I can look at NVQs. At the time NVQs were introduced City and Guilds was the body who came most strongly behind the Government's initiative. That is why we still do more than 50 per cent of all NVQs in the country against the other 100 awarding bodies which do them. The commitment of the organisation to making NVQs a reality was great. Having said that: did we fight hard enough to make it the right qualification and absolutely fit for purpose? Probably not, because I do not think they fit the qualification of "absolutely fit for purpose" and that is one of the reasons why we are in a major review of vocational qualifications today. Does the organisation share some responsibility? Of course it must. Q2 Chairman: It is very noble of you to say that. In terms of your analysis for putting it right, how do we tackle the under-skilling of the population of the United Kingdom? We come out pretty well in higher education, do we not, in international comparisons? We are not the best, but, in terms of that layer of people you would expect to have a reasonable skill base, we do not seem to be anywhere near the competition in France, in Germany and some of our other major competitors. How do we get on a competitive level with them? Mr Humphries: The short answer to that would be to say that I wrote four volumes of reports on that for the Skills Task Force, so to summarise it very quickly is difficult. Let me pull out four or five key issues. The first has to be the extent to which we have succeeded, through our foundation education system, our school system, in creating an outflow from that system in which the vast majority of young people actually come out with training skills, education, knowledge and understanding which suit them for work. Yet what we still have today is a system where 50 per cent of young people fail to meet the expected standard for passing. In part that is because the school curriculum is narrowly focused, has tended to be highly academic, highly elitist in that sense, has failed to meet the needs of the 100 per cent rather than focusing on acting as a giant filter to draw out those who are fit for academic pursuits. Many countries quite some years ago recognised the need to design their school system to meet the needs of 100 per cent of young people rather than acting as a filter. We have not yet cracked that. That is the history of successive policies and initiatives over 60 years since the 1940 Act, so I do not think you can fix it overnight. Some of the ideas which are built into the 14-19 review at the moment are meant to do that. However, the problem is that addressing that sort of system and fixing the school system does little for the 80 to 90 per cent of the workforce which are already in work today and which actually suffer from that history and have lower skills. The second thing one needs to do is to focus on the skills of those in the workforce or those who would like to be in the workforce and overcome the weaknesses which the foundation system in a sense sentenced them to. The third thing undoubtedly is to do something about coming to grips with the role of employers. If you want to look into Europe you see a fundamentally different cultural and social system. Despite the fact that we helped to establish the chamber framework of the Germanic countries after the Second World War, we failed to do to this country the things we actually gave authority to employers to do through the chambers of commerce system. We could have done a lot more to engage the business community directly in the design and management of training, particularly that training which feeds in from about 13 or 14 onwards. We chose not to and we retained a system which failed to engage employers. Can we do that and replicate current UK practice? No. The culture is now totally different. The idea of establishing the sort of framework which the Germanic countries have with mandatory registration, with licence to practice on almost every job there is ... These are the sorts of ideas we may experiment with and develop, but we cannot simply block impose them on the country. We need to work cleverly with employers. Undoubtedly we need to fix the qualification framework; it has become terribly fragmented and terribly confusing to employers. The university system is remarkably simple, despite the fact that the complexity is real. To the public it appears that there is one institution, universities, and there is one qualification, degrees, and then there are bits on the side. We have not created that clarity about the further education system: it is highly confused and indeed driven by a whole set of competing policy initiatives which complicate the system, everything from "Let's have nice short disconnected courses because that is what people want", even though what we need is organised, coherent training on a large scale for occupational purposes. There are many contradictions and anomalies in the system caused by competing policy priorities, so that would be the fourth bit: fix the qualification system and the incoherency in the current framework. The final one I would offer at this point is to try to ensure that our policies and our practices are joined up. It is amazing how often and how easy it is in complex systems to have a clear policy and then create perverse incentives by the funding regimes, the quality assurance regimes, the inspection regimes, the target setting and key performance indicator regimes which we have, so that what appears to be a common policy in fact gets reflected on the ground as a set of incoherent practices. If I may give you one example, when colleges were incorporated and the FCSE came into play, every college sat down as soon as they received the tariff regime, because they were then financially independent, and worked out which course would give them the best profit and which course would give them the biggest loss and they cut all the ones which would make a loss on the grounds that they thought if that was what the funding regime was designed to do, to make them do the right things, they would follow the incentives of the public regime. In fact our policy was quite different. There needs to be a long hard look at the extent to which policy and practice interrelate effectively to drive the system in the right way and I incorporate joined-up practice between government departments as a part of that. Q3 Chairman: Talking informally amongst ourselves, there was some disagreement between us about what the central thrust of your recent book was. All of us have dipped into it and some of us have even read it right through. In Does Education Matter? what were you really driving at? What was the central thesis? Professor Wolf: In terms of policy, the central thesis of that book is that one should be very cautious about how ambitious one is as a central government policy maker about one's ability to fine-tune and organise education for the economy. In policy terms that is perhaps the most important thing that I wanted to put over. Some of the things which I dissect there in terms, for example, of growing "credentialism", which is worldwide, the pressure on young people to go for academic qualifications which is worldwide, just as strongly felt in Germanic countries as here, is not something we can do anything about. Maybe it would be nice to go back to 1950 and do things differently, but we cannot. There are things we can do differently and that does relate to how far we are wildly ambitious in terms of what we can direct from the centre and I also think we can and should understand - and that is the sub-text to this point about governments needing to be more realistic - that there are inherent pressures in anything which is run centrally. It is not simply that it is a bad idea to have targets - which is a point I should like to return to later if I may - but that the minute you try to run something centrally you are caught up in the dynamics of the governmental process and that means that you have to have clear objectives which are measured, you have to have clear policies which go into the files and are passed through. Therefore, unless you are very careful, if you start by being extremely over-ambitious and thinking you can run something from the centre, that you can fine tune, you can plan the economy, you can, if not plan the economy plan the qualifications and skills of the economy which basically implies that you know exactly where the economy is going, it is absolutely inevitable, given the internal workings of a large complex governmental machinery, that you will end up with a large number of unintended and undesired consequences. The policy message of that book is that we should be much, much more careful about what we think can be done centrally and much less inclined to hubris in thinking that as informed, platonic guardians of the system we know better than young people and their families or individual employers what they should be learning and what they should be doing. Q4 Chairman: Fine; thank you for that. Would you counsel us to go to a laissez-faire system where government really has a minimal role with the background that we do not have the greatest reputation in terms of our employers looking benevolently on their workforces and training for the future and not poaching. Professor Wolf: May I mount a slight defence of our employers at this point? Actually if you look at OECD statistics, they are doing really quite well. One should not simply assume, as we are all very prone to do in this country, that everything we do we do worse than everybody else. I should like to footnote that. It depends what you mean by a complete laissez-faire system. I think very much that we do need to move to a position where we are empowering individual learners and to some degree individual institutions more than we have. It is always very easy to paint extremes and to some extent I have done that on one side in terms of criticising the attempt of previous governments to plan exactly the qualifications which were needed from the centre and I have argued, I hope convincingly, that it was predictable that this would not work. Clearly it is almost impossible to imagine a situation in which governments do not have any say about things which are needed. One of the roles of government has to be to notice when things are going very badly wrong. It is also true that when you are trying to do everything, you also tend to miss a lot of the things which are going very badly wrong, because you are so occupied with running things that you do not need to be running. There is a lot of evidence that if you give people, by entitlements, the chance to choose their own courses and their own education, they will make choices which are at least as good and very often much better than those which are made for them. What worries me at the moment is that although on the one hand we talk about empowering learners, in fact we are still very much in an environment where we are encouraging Learning and Skills Councils to have detailed plans of how many hairdressers you need in Skegness and how many plumbers you need in Liverpool. I am not joking; this is the way we are going and we are also driving our further education colleges and other places in terms of numbers of qualifications, which are classified in the most simplistic way by levels. I cannot see any evidence anywhere, either in my own experience or in other people's experience, to suggest that is likely to be more efficient or more equitable than genuinely leaving it to learners and indeed employers to make decisions. Chairman: We shall come back to several of those points later on but I am hogging the questions. Let us move on to looking at the skills background in more depth. Q5 Mr Chaytor: What do you think the relationship is between skills and productivity, if there is one? Professor Wolf: Genuine but very, very difficult to work out exactly would be my answer. This is one of the problems. Clearly at some level you cannot have a productive economy without a skilled workforce. You start from that fact. If you look at why our countries are so productive compared, for example, with some of the countries of the world which are labouring at levels of poverty which it is almost impossible for most of our systems to imagine. Of course it has to do with this constellation of skills which we all have, including ones which we have inherited, a large amount of know-how which we have actually inherited, and it is why, just to give you a concrete example, one of the things which is quite interesting is how rarely multinationals invest in very poor countries; not how often they do, but how rarely they do. They do not, because there is not the infrastructure of skills and the know-how and understanding and all these very complex things which go to make a productive economy. At one level, it is just tremendously important; it is also tremendously important in the sense that if you are looking towards the future, it is all the things we have not thought about yet. That is where the importance of having high general levels of education comes in: it is all the things you might want, but which by definition you cannot plan for exactly because they are the things which have not yet been created. Part of the problem is that it is very clearly there. To give you another concrete example, I recently did some case study research with a colleague, Professor Celia Hoyles at the Institute of Education, looking at the use of maths in the workplace. We were looking at how maths is used in the modern workplace. It is used, but it is not used in the way where you make a list and say John needs to know Pythagoras and Edna needs to know a bit of co-ordinate geometry. It is not like that at all. It is very, very important in terms of ways of thinking. At that level it is clearly very important, but in the sense of saying you can actually say X per cent of where we are behind the Germans - assuming you can even agree on your measure of productivity - is because there are fewer qualifications here or, if you want to make that industry more productive, the most sensible thing for them to do is to send everybody off to college to get a new qualification, it is really very hard to find examples where you can actually say that. It does not usually work in that nice neat, plug-it-in way. Occasionally you will have very clear skill shortages, but I have to say that the skill shortage concept is often a very murky one; it is not really like that. Often when you try to do that, what you come out with is the answer that you have too many and not too few, which is quite common. The answer is that it is there, but the idea that if you have an economy you pile up some skills and throw them in and everything will change seems to me quite wrong. The British economy over the last 20 years is surely a monument to that, is it not? We seem to have been doing rather well, exactly at the time when we have been getting more and more anguished over education. I am sure we have been right to in some ways, but it underscores how complex and non-simplistic the relationship is. Mr Humphries: I would agree with that and I would add a few other considerations. The contributions to productivity are numerous. There is no doubt that investment has a huge impact on productivity, there is no doubt that competition can actually be a huge driver towards, although not a causative factor in, productivity. Innovation has been demonstrated as being in that set of skills. I would certainly agree with Alison that trying to break that down and identify what proportion is accountable for which is impossible. It is equally impossible to see any one of them as a solution. You can invest all the money in the world in skills, but if in fact a huge contributor to the productivity gap was a systemic lack of investment over the last 40 to 50 years, which is actually pretty true of the UK economy, then believing you can fix it with skills and do nothing about investment would be to miss the point as well. This is part of the problem. We are not sitting there in a situation where it is possible to say that this is our productivity gap and this bunch of skills, this much investment, that much innovation, fix those and oops we are suddenly all okay again, because they interact with each other. If you are going to make a big investment, for instance in UK technology, and you do that without upskilling the workforce to make the most effective use of that technology, you have wasted the investment in the first place. These things are complicated and integrated and I would agree that skills are a critical element of it and it is very easy to have a negative impact on productivity by ignoring them, but no-one has succeeded in taking a snapshot of the UK economy and seeing how much of that problem is skills. Q6 Mr Chaytor: You cannot measure the impact of skills on productivity. Mr Humphries: Probably the NEISR has done some of the most serious work on attempting to quantify the different proportions each make to the productivity gap and they would confess that they did it because they were asked to do it rather than because they had a firm handle on how to do it. The reality is, if you ask me for the two or three biggest contributors to the UK productivity gap, I would defer to the work I did at the British Chambers of Commerce in those years and say it is down to systemic under-investment over many, many years associated with the boom-bust economic cycle which transcends any single government. It undoubtedly reflects for me the large number of young people who come out of the education system without a set of skills which equips them properly for work and that is an historic problem as well. Probably our lack of success in converting a highly inventive culture into an innovative culture would be my third one where we are undoubtedly one of the world leaders in invention, but very poor often at converting good inventions into integrated business practices which work. I would put those three there; I would find it very difficult to separate them out. Q7 Mr Chaytor: Does it matter that we have half the number of qualified technicians that the French or the Germans do? Professor Wolf: I am not sure it does, but I will let Chris disagree with me on that. I think that one of the things which is really getting in the way of sensible policy here is undoubtedly counting the number of qualified people at different levels. I do not know whether other people in the room remember when cargo cults were around in the Pacific; I do not know whether I was alive but I remember learning about them. It was this idea that you worship the aeroplane and if you had a model of the aeroplane it would shower you with gifts, the way they seemed to drop out of aeroplanes which flew over and dropped food supplies. I do feel sometimes that qualification numbers have taken on a kind of cargo cult aura in this country. The fact that people have a number of certificates at an artificial level, which is what the qualification framework really involves, does not tell you anything very much about whether or not people are learning anything. It may be an extremely imperfect indicator, but it is perfectly possible for people to learn a great deal without having a formal certificate. It is also perfectly possible to acquire a formal certificate which is put in a framework and labelled level 2 and which has not actually added anything to what somebody knew before they started the course. This is why we are finding that when you look at the impact on pupils' earnings of acquiring additional low level qualification, there is very often no evident impact whatsoever. When you start digging away this ceases to be surprising. The answer is that it only matters if we have fewer qualified technicians, if we have all sorts of other reasons for supposing that we have real problems in developing those industries which are related to skills. Coming back to where I started, there are areas where we have very clear indications that we are seriously under-skilled and things to do with quantitative mathematical skills would be one of them. There are also very clear indications that in construction and engineering we have genuine skill shortages. If you look, for example, at the most recent research on the number of jobs in an economy which are classified as needing a level 2 or level 3 or a degree qualification in the broader sense, you find that we already have too many people qualified at each of those levels. The conclusion I would draw is not in the least that that means we already have far more skills than we need in the economy. That would seem to me to be a crazy conclusion to draw. We do need to improve our education system and we have far too many people who are being ill served and we are short of some very specific skills. It does in a sense underline the flip side of worrying about not having as many qualifications as the French, because then if we find we have all these mismatches in the sense that there are too many people, if we really believe that the numbers matter we should at this point pack up and go home and say we have licked it. Mr Humphries: I may surprise Alison by not disagreeing with her as much as she thinks. To take your question in the way you ask it, I would probably say, probably not. But, there is a whole series of issues surrounding the skills base in the UK which we tend to seek to measure by the proxy of qualifications which are real and which we need to recognise. The first thing is that although employers will often tell you they do not care about qualifications, ask them how they first filter the long list of applicants they receive for any job. I can tell you that the very first thing they use is qualifications. The very first filter is probably used to eliminate 90 per cent of most application groups down to the first long list; it even plays a key part in eliminating the next five per cent. When they tell you qualifications do not matter, what they are telling you is that actually they do not bother with them internally, but they do use them as a proxy for skill on a regular basis. Ask individuals whether qualifications matter to them, in terms of their access to productive work, to promotion, to progression, and they matter like heck. The second issue which then has to be looked at is the extent to which those individuals have the necessary skills for progression and development. We know that anybody, no matter what level of qualification, even if none at all, who gets a job and spends any time in the workplace develops adaptive and coping strategies; even the highly illiterate and innumerate individuals working in the workplace can be amazingly clever at hiding and concealing those weaknesses and at being able to develop coping strategies in the workplace to deliver. However, find out what happens when that job or their skills in that job actually disappear. Then they have to enter the next programme of learning which will give them the skills for the next job and find out how they cope and the reality of course is that they do not. This is one of the points NIESR often make about adult skills and whether qualifications matter. The point is that these people are capable, they have adapted and coped. What they cannot do is continue to participate very effectively and they account for large numbers of those who, when they lose work find it very difficult to get back into work again. That is a second area where they matter. Are the qualifications the right qualifications for the system we have? Almost certainly not. In that sense I would agree with many of Alison's concerns. If we do not have a framework which is highly fit for purpose and highly related to the real skills needs of today and the future, then we can have as many qualified people as we like, but they will not solve the productivity issue. For me the issues are around the extent to which they provide a key entry ticket to the labour market and a ticket to opportunities for promotion in the labour market. The extent to which they are the first filter? Ask employers what it is they are looking at when they are talking about skills shortages and set aside for the moment those employers who are simply telling you they are not very good at recruiting and look at those areas where there are real skill shortages. What you will find they are talking about is a shortage of people with the right qualification on a piece of paper applying through their door. So do they matter in that context? Yes, they do. Are they some sort of magic formula? Undoubtedly not. Is it feasible to train a workforce to all the scales and standards you need but not have them qualified? Of course it is. The thing I would remind you of in return on that is that I was working in the Hertfordshire TEC at the time of the huge British Aerospace closure in Hatfield. Remember that one? Thousands of jobs, the whole of our regional aircraft industry shut down in a year. My TEC was involved in trying to get that workforce back into work. These were some of the most highly capable and highly skilled individuals we have probably ever produced in metal working, electronics, mechanics, engineering and so on. We could not get them jobs. They could not get jobs. The outplacement consultant could not get them jobs. British Aerospace could not get them jobs. It was because the British Aerospace policy was very simple: they trained their workforce but they did not qualify them. The moment you try to place those people into work somewhere else, the response of the other employer is that they know they can work for British Aerospace, but they do not make aircraft they make fridges, or they make metal parts or this sort of thing and there is no indication that these people are capable of adaptation. Yet within six months of us upskilling and doing accreditation of prior learning and qualifying those people we had every single one of the workforce into work. Do qualifications matter? Yes, they do, but not quite in the way of the immediate assumption which says "qualifications mean productivity". Q8 Mr Chaytor: You are both describing a system in which the state cannot accurately predict the impact of increasing the overall level of qualification. There is no-one, apart from maybe the odd esoteric academic here or there, who can calculate the impact of qualifications on productivity. A system in which a state, over a generation, has created a fragmented marketplace for qualifications which is confusing to employers. What is the state's responsibility at all in getting this right? Alison, you are saying the state should have no involvement in delivering qualifications. Professor Wolf: I am saying significantly less. Q9 Mr Chaytor: Leave it to the individuals to decide on their own training. Chris was quoting a very good example where the state did need to intervene to correct a situation. Professor Wolf: No, it was not the state in the Hatfield example, which is what is so interesting about this example. Q10 Mr Chaytor: It was the Hertfordshire TEC. Mr Humphries: Undoubtedly the TEC was the organisation which made it happen. The issue could have been solved easily by their outplacement consultants or anyone else, indeed it could have been solved by the company in the first place by simply recognising that they had a responsibility which went beyond the workplace. Mr Chaytor: My question really is: is British Aerospace not an example of the flaws in the system which emerge when training is the responsibility of the employer and there is no responsibility to qualify and therefore there is a need to intervene. The TEC, as the agent of the state, had to intervene to ensure that these individuals who had been trained by their employer were subsequently qualified to work with other employers? Q11 Chairman: Professor Wolf's argument would surely have been that it would all have sorted itself out without any intermediaries at all. These were highly skilled people without outside qualifications and many employers do not like transferable qualifications, do they, because employees can be poached? Is that your view, Professor? Professor Wolf: May I answer that because I do not want to be caricatured as saying that the state has no interest whatsoever and no responsibilities whatsoever. I do think it is an interesting example. What happened was indeed an issue, that these people were thrown onto the labour market and they did not have qualifications. It is an important role of the state to hold the lead in terms of setting general rules and authorising people, as they authorise the university sector, to give qualifications. That seems to me to be the classic weights and measures function of the state. It does indeed have some such requirement. One of the things which Chris said earlier and I found very interesting was that we have no problems understanding what universities do, that they give degrees; they have some concerns about individual universities but basically people understand it. It seems to me that this is a clear example where yes, the employers did not qualify, but the higher education sector was able to do so with minimal direct involvement of the state, because it had been set up and authorised by the state to be a trustworthy institution which could do that. This encapsulates the philosophy which I should like to put forward, not that the state has no role whatsoever, but that when the state starts to get involved in the minutiae, for all sorts of unavoidable reasons, which has nothing to do with bad intent on the part of the state but has to do with the dynamics of state involvement and the problems, it is as likely to do harm as it is to do good by creating unnecessary bureaucracy, unnecessary complexity. I do think that this whole issue of what has happened to vocational qualifications really encapsulates this. The period during which vocational qualifications have become more and more incomprehensible to the population has been exactly that period in which the state decided time and time again that it had to do something about them. This is actually an argument from experience, not an argument from first principle that I am trying to put forward here. This is what tends to happen and the state does indeed have obligations: it has obligations to give people the wherewithal to get their training, it has obligations, for example, to make it certain that if they are thrown onto the labour market they are in a position to get qualifications and to get their experience accredited and it has above all the responsibility to set up and monitor at a distance the institutions which do this. Trying to get involved in the minutiae of companies' training policies and the minutiae of particular qualifications which Chris and other awarding bodies set up is something which we now know from experience the state is not very good at. Q12 Chairman: You are surely in danger, if you said the one thing you have to have is individuals with the ability to make judgments about what is the best course for them and the best decisions to take. Surely where your argument fails is that the state has to make sure that those people are literate, numerate and can judge the evidence reasonably. Professor Wolf: We are talking about adult skills here rather than children, right? That was my understanding. There is a difference between children and adults. Q13 Chairman: How many people do we have in our country who do not have literacy and numeracy? Professor Wolf: It depends on your definition and on which survey you believe. Mr Humphries: You have hit on one of the most critical issues that the skills strategy has to address and that is: what is the responsibility of the state, what is the responsibility of employers, what is the responsibility of the individual? It is in the strategy itself and this is the real issue. For me, why does the prospect of the level 2 entitlement matter? It directly relates to David's question and to yours as well. It matters because surely the population, the constituency, has a reasonable expectation that the education system under the management of the state should provide a sound foundation of learning to all as they enter adulthood and the workplace. If you like, one of the most important thrusts of the strategy is to say yes, that is right and if 50 per cent of them are coming out without those skills then actually it should be the responsibility of the state to fix it. If we did have a good solid skills base amongst the vast majority of the adult population, whether there would be any need for a continuing state intervention at higher levels is the interesting question. My suspicion is that the system would work much better if we had equipped the whole of the population with a platform. This is why I do think this does matter, the 14-19 agenda and children do matter in this context, because it is the failings there which have often led us to have to intervene at the adult level. Q14 Chairman: This Committee sometimes has to have hard examples. Let me give you one which is a prejudice of mine. How do you both feel about a country which allows children to leave school at 16, to leave full-time education into employment with no guarantee of skills or educational training of any kind? What do you think? Do you think that is okay? Many of our competitors think it is certainly not okay to allow a sixteen-year-old child to go into the workplace with no guarantee of anything happening to them in educational terms. Mr Humphries: Personally I would say we let a frightening proportion of the young population leave school at 13 or 14. They may still be physically attending the institutions, but they have left and they have left because they are actually in a system which is very narrow, very focused, very elitist, makes a very strong assumption that the only route forward that matters is the academic one and we condemn them at the age of 11, 12 or 13 rather than 16. The problem is creating a system which does not cause them to disengage at 13, 14 and leave at 15 and 16. I would agree with you, but the problem which needs addressing is how to create an education system which serves the 100 per cent rather than the 50 per cent. It is the 50 per cent who do not get anything at 16 who leave in the situation you describe and the solution to that starts at 11 rather than 16. Professor Wolf: I agree with everything Chris said. I do think it is very important to look at it that way round. There is always a major difference between adults and children and a sixteen-year-old is not a full adult and therefore has to be thought of as not a full adult. I also think it is extremely important to understand that the history of the last 20 years is of increasing numbers of our young people staying on longer than ever before and then dropping out again quite soon afterwards. That is a failure of the provision. It is not a failure of the legislative framework whereby you say it will all be fixed if you force them to stay until 18, or if you finally implemented things which were expected back in 1944 which said that everybody who is in work has to have some further education training. The real problem is that we are physically not providing a large number of our young people with anything they think it is worth staying for. Q15 Paul Holmes: May I push you to clarify what we are talking about in terms of whether it is training people to come out of school with or adult training and retraining at 40 or 50? One of the criticisms some people make of the current drift of policy making is that we have an FE White Paper looking at 16 and all the way upwards. We have a Green Paper on 14-19 and the two are separate, they overlap but they do not talk to each other. Are you saying that as far as the skills gap is concerned, as far as there is one, we are not really looking at what people come out of school at 16 or 18 with, but we are looking at adults? Mr Humphries: Are we not facing a situation where we have to address both? It seems to me that if the description I have given and the 50 per cent problem are genuine and the proportion of young people getting five A to Cs has not changed for a long time in significant terms, then you have two jobs: the first one is to fix the 14-19 system so that it does serve the 100 per cent. Even if we do, and let us say we succeed in that brilliantly, for the next 30 years there will still be 80 per cent of the adult workforce who came out of the system before we fixed it lacking skills in all sorts of ways and at all sorts of levels. Alison mentioned mathematics as one of them but it is not just mathematics, it is their ability to use numbers and angles to solve real work problems. If we do not address those sorts of issues as well, then we are going to take 30 years to solve the problems because it will take the time that new generation has to age through the workforce. So you have to do both. Yes, of course, they must be joined up, but the things we need to do to solve the issues of the low-skilled 40-year-old and the things we need to do today to solve the 14-19 system actually are fundamentally different. What they should do over time is converge, but they cannot until we start to do enough to address the adult who is disengaged and low skilled at the same time as we ensure that the 14-19 system starts to produce a cohort which is 85 to 95 per cent work capable and having opportunities for progressing into the workplace. Q16 Paul Holmes: In so far as we try to fix the 14-19 curriculum or the 11-19 curriculum for the 50 per cent which, I would agree with you, as a former secondary school teacher, schools do not deal with very well, what are we talking about? Are we talking about simply giving them at that age better basic skills in maths, English and ICT presumably, or are we talking about bringing in vocational and work-based training back to age 14 instead of waiting for people to leave school for that? Professor Wolf: I do not know whether this is something on which we disagree or not. Q17 Chairman: We quite welcome disagreement. Professor Wolf: We might; it has been slightly surprising that we have not disagreed more, but maybe we are finally going to. I do not believe in bringing vocational education back to fourteen-year-olds in the sense it is very frequently thought of. I think this is a disservice to the idea of vocational education; it implies that it is something which is for kids who cannot cope with anything. This is completely misconceived and the idea that large numbers of employers are just waiting for a dissatisfied fourteen-year-old to come and be around the place for a day and a half seems to me just nuts. I do not know who these saints are. There is a serious challenge in terms of how you conceive of the curriculum for fourteen to nineteen-year-olds who are not finding the current more academic end more satisfactory. It has been a consistent failure of the last 15 to 20 years in this country. It is the worst failure in our education policy and we have kept re-inventing, kept re-inventing and kept, in my view, being seduced by qualification structures rather than worrying about the curriculum content inside them. It is not just about basic literacy, basic numeracy, basic IT, it is about trying to develop slowly, in a costly and consistent fashion, good general education which may have a lot of practical and vocational flavour to it, but which is not about turning fourteen-year-olds into bad plumbers. Trying to feel that you can re-invent and get young people who have good prospects to make almost irrevocable vocational choices at 14 in the way our grandfathers may have done is not possible. You cannot and should not turn that back. First of all, that is the thing which has to be done and to me the biggest priority for 14-19 education is about the curriculum for the other 50 per cent and not about qualification structures. I do actually agree very strongly with you about the two bits not being joined up, because it seems to me that over the last 10 to 15 years we have in fact been separating out the qualification, the curriculum for full-time young people from what was available, often to adult returnees, in FE colleges without getting it straight in our heads. If we are serious about making it easier for adults who left school without high levels of skill to come back and to get general skills - when I talk about skills I do mean come back for an education which may or may not have a direct impact on their working lives tomorrow, but which will have an impact on all their lives further down - then the other thing we have to think about is what we are offering them. Traditionally one of the strengths of this country has been that it has been very easy to come back by the standards of most of our continental neighbours. You could come back into an FE college and you could pick up an O level or a GCSE later, or you could come back and do an A level in two years and there are many access courses. The way the 14-18 curriculum is developing is that it is more and more conceived of in terms of young people in full-time education and we are inadvertently losing quite a lot of the flexibility and access to what used to be adult GCSEs, which do not exist any more, to one-year A-level courses, to many of the general education components which used to be available to adults. That is something we are at real risk of losing sight of. We are focusing on 14-19 as though that took care of general education and it does not. Q18 Paul Holmes: Both of you are very critical about the way government sets too many targets, such as "We need X number of hairdressers in this town" and the way it arranges the financial targets' measurement. When David Milliband sits in that chair, he is very fierce, in talking about secondary education, that we must have testing, we must have targets, we must have league tables or we will not know what is happening in education and we cannot drive the schools to improve. If you do not have targets for FE, how would you know your money was going to a useful purpose, how would you know what was going on? Mr Humphries: I have to be careful about criticising targets and the way in which we sometimes do them. It is of course perfectly legitimate that it is very difficult to manage anything if one does not understand what is happening and in that sense management information indicators and targets actually help. I must admit I do think it is more important to measure than to set targets. Knowing what is going on rather than assuming you know where to take it in the long term are very different issues. Equally, there is a problem with setting too many targets. There is a wonderful little mathematic programme called Langton's ant. This is a classic example of the problem Alison was addressing. It is a very simple mathematical formula. All you do is decide which way an object on the screen turns. It only has two parameters and everyone would think that it is just going to produce a standard set of outcomes, but it is very interesting. It behaves one way for the first 25 moves, it behaves totally differently and randomly for the next 1,000 or more moves and then suddenly it does something entirely unexpected and goes off at a tangent which is totally unpredictable; nothing in mathematics could ever have predicted that outcome. It is a remarkably simple formula. The basic thing it illustrates is that the moment you have too many targets, too many variables, too many things you are trying to manipulate, you produce a system which becomes unpredictable. I am certainly not saying you should not have measures and you should not be able to manage the system through measurement and that you should not have targets. What I am saying is that the more you try to design and run a system by a mix and complexity of targets, the more likely you are to have absolutely no idea what you will produce at the end of the day. We see that regularly with what are often talked about as perverse outcomes: a sound policy strategy, what looks like a sensible set of approaches, suddenly producing output related funding. Some of you must remember that from the TEC regime, where the intention was to address the fact that students were staying on their course for too long but never actually closing or finishing their assessments and graduating. What was introduced was output related funding; a small incentive, 10, 15, 20 to 25 per cent of the funding held until the end and paid over when that person finally completed. It sounded great. What was the impact of it? What it actually did was cause the providers to pre-select those who would pass and ignore the training needs of those who were most disadvantaged. It is a classic case of an entirely sensible policy and what looked like a sound management strategy actually leading to a fundamentally perverse outcome. What I am saying is too many targets, too many different policy initiatives, all seeking to measure different aspects of the system are more likely to produce surprise outcomes rather than the outcomes you want. I am never against management information, I am never against sensible management performance observation and performance assessment, but make the system complex and you almost certainly lose the ability to manage it. Professor Wolf: I agree absolutely that measurement is not the same as targets. That is a fundamental difference and the more one hangs onto that the better. If you pay institutions in terms of targets, you will absolutely, as night follows day, devalue what is going on. Just to give you a concrete example in terms of pre-selection, you can hit a level 2 qualification in maths either by going for a two-skill application or GCSE in maths. If you have a level 2 entitlement it is one thing and you can leave it to the customer who will definitely say that what they want is a GCSE because that is what the employer wants. If you leave it to the institution, they are under tremendous pressure to achieve the targets and they will go for the one where they can pre-select and they will get the pass rates more easily. That encapsulates the dilemma. Of course you have to have measurement and of course you have to have this done by independent institutions. So when David Milliband talks about the importance of having tests within the school system to look at whether young people are achieving anything I am completely with him. When you start trying to set targets to which financial performance and financial awards are tied in a one-to-one fashion, you are automatically going to devalue the product you think you are operating. Mr Humphries: It is like teaching to the exam, is it not? We have seen that concern expressed in the press about teachers starting to teach to the exam rather than teach to the syllabus or employers' needs or the needs of the higher education institutions for those going in that direction. There is that tendency and that is what we need to be wary of and to work against it happening, but it is not about not measuring. Q19 Helen Jones: I want to take you back to what happens in secondary education, if I may. I agree that we need to get the basics right there. My first question is that we all talk so blithely about this 14-19 stage but what evidence do we have that it ought to be a distinct stage beginning at 14 rather than 13 or 15 and ending at 19? Why those figures? Do you agree it is a separate stage? Mr Humphries: There is an issue here about stages of life and stages of development. What we have ended up doing is turning an attempt to reflect the varying needs of young people at different stages of development with some hard and fast age boundaries which are actually proxies for what we are talking about rather than reality. There is no evidence which says it starts at 14 and finishes at 19 or that it is better at 13 and finishing at 18. The problem is that we are talking about trying to pick up a young person at the stage where they are starting to form and identify some of the expectations being placed on them, seeking for themselves to struggle to find solutions which fit their needs. We are really encapsulating almost a Piagettian developmental stage with a robust or rigorous set, rigid set even, or age boundaries which are in a very real sense proxies. However, it is more than just curriculum that we are talking about here. There is also an element of pedagogy. Different young people actually respond to different learning experiences in different ways at different stages of their life. Some will always respond more advantageously to certain types of teachers' styles and learning styles than others. The thing I was going to pick up from Alison's answer about the problem here is that I think pedagogy is a key part of the problem as well. I would not be pressing very hard at all to teach bricklaying and hairdressing at 14 or at 13. In fact at a seminar recently David Milliband asked a group of us whether we believed in streaming at 14; I cannot think of anything worse to do to young people yet that is what the implication of teaching bricklaying at that age would be. I do think what we have to do is recognise that young people are different, they need choice in the curriculum, real choice and we also need to recognise that they learn in different ways, that they need different styles, environments, that they need treatments and we need to skill teachers and the system in pedagogical variety, which is currently completely missing. That also affects the age boundary and means that you are working with a continuum probably from 11 to 21 for young people and that 14-19 has almost become a proxy for that. Tomlinson is not actually talking about hard age boundaries. In the discussions in the Tomlinson group, there is a recognition that this is about phasing, that young people pass through this at different speeds and come out of the system with different levels and at different times. That is the critical thing. We are trying to use this to describe a phase of development of a young person which is that phase prior to them becoming adults and entering the workplace. Professor Wolf: I do not know where 14-19 came from. It is the FES organisational thing, is it not? In a sense I agree with you absolutely, I cannot see why 14-19 should be particularly the key issue. It seems to me that there are various things which you can see in the compulsory and immediate post-compulsory years which are problems in our education. I would have thought they were centred around 15 through 17 in a sense in that seems to be where things most often go wrong for young people. It seems to me that 14-19 is just taking a cut which you would perfectly well have made 13-18 or 15-21. That is absolutely right. This comes back to one of the questions the Chairman posed to me earlier about whether government have no real responsibilities. Government do have very real responsibilities to young people; every country in the world has a compulsory education system of some sort even if that does not mean you have to be educated in schools. One of the things which in a sense is very interesting in this country - and indeed in most countries I suppose - is that it is felt that about 16 is where the common element tends to break up. I do not have any real quarrel with that in terms of the age of young people and all the rest of it, but in terms of where we seem to me to be not getting it right most visibly and most importantly, they remain interestingly parts of that compulsory period, the end of the compulsory period and the end of the immediate post-compulsory period, when we are visibly not getting it right for at least half of our young people and have continually not got it right now for some time and where we are also creating stored-up genuine skills shortages for the future in very specific areas. I suppose what I am arguing for is sometimes zeroing in on the problems rather than worrying too much about getting the whole structure complete and neat. Q20 Helen Jones: That is very interesting, thank you. If, as you say, we have to offer a choice to young people, how do we do that and combine it with a bedrock of knowledge and skills which everybody ought to have? I should be interested in your views on what that basic entitlement for all young people ought to be and whether you think vocational GCSEs have a role to play in that or whether that risks us training people for jobs which may no longer exist when they leave school. How do we get round that? How do we give them the core, basic skills, whether they are going to go through an academic route or any other route, which will actually make people employable and generally able to cope with life when they leave? Mr Humphries: It seems to me that the purpose of the foundation learning system - and I use that to describe what it is we provide for young people to prepare them for work and adult life - is about a core. It is not just employability, because the state owes as much to its young population to help them understand the social complexity of life as much as the employment complexity of life, but you are right, the core of our education system should be something which actually does not exist in the national curriculum. What does not exist in the national curriculum? Anything which is actually called or relevant in any real way to that broad preparation for work and adult life. If you look at many of the submissions to Tomlinson, you will see that much of the discussion which is in there is about what this core looks like and the debate we are having about this for the first time is actually seeking to understand some of that. What we have ended up doing is creating a curriculum which is essentially driven by academic subjects: what GCSEs are you doing? Are vocational GCSEs the answer? From my perspective, absolutely not. Certainly a system which seeks to inculcate the capabilities and skills of hairdressing or retail working into a young person and starts to narrow their choices at 14 to me is something which concerns me enormously. We have to be looking at a curriculum which does have its heart, have the intention, to enable every young person to have the understanding necessary to prepare them adequately for work and adult life. Every aspect of social communication, family, citizenship, employability, basic skills, all of those things for me are the core of what the education system should be about and that richness of practical and vocational flavour should be at the heart of the system and the range of subjects around that from which a young person can choose should be quite broadly based and include a good mix of those things which are general education in the sense in which we know them, but with the option to do some of the subjects we have almost taken out of the curriculum, which have a design, technology, vocational dimension and allow people to see that we value those capabilities as much as we do the traditional subjects. Q21 Chairman: People like you and Professor Wolf have sat on influential advisory bodies for years designing a curriculum. Then another group of experts pitches up here and says the curriculum is the real problem, it is awful. How on earth did we get to a curriculum which is so universally condemned when so many people must have given advice on what was needed? Mr Humphries: I can honestly claim never to have sat on any of those on the schools curriculum. Professor Wolf: I have actually designed one in the last ten years of which I am very proud; I was not solely responsible for it, but it is partly an answer to your question on the cause. It was a new set of maths qualifications which are still out there, which are embedded in practical activities and which are very popular with the people who do them and which do not get done that much because of funding mechanisms, equivalence things and all the rest of it. This is a long story, but it is extremely unusual for people like us to have a go and I should like to come back to it, because it does relate to the answer about what should be guaranteed. I would want to put it rather differently. In a curious way I think the most important vocational qualifications you can have in the modern world are actually the most traditional academic ones. That does not mean necessarily the academic qualifications, but they are the skills, not just of numbers but of mathematics, of being able to think mathematically about the structure and the way things work and to be able to write well and fluently and correctly and to be able to read at a very high level to find information to be able to condense and comprehend prose. Those are absolutely core to your ability to function as a citizen, to enjoy life and to do well in a vocational world. If I am being invited to say what I would do if I were a minister, it would be to say that those are the things to which young people have an entitlement. Yes, in a sense everything around that is much more optional, it is not important whether it is designer technology or geography, but those skills are absolutely fundamental and they are also the ones which employers recognise. Most of the time this evening I am conscious that I have been criticising the way we have spawned qualifications, re-labelled them, but I also agree that there are some qualifications which have tremendous importance in the marketplace and which are extraordinarily important. This again goes back to asking adults what they would like to do and they will want to get the qualifications which they know the world recognises and they tend to be very well established ones. It does seem to me that whatever we do or do not do, we have to make a commitment and then create the curriculum and pedagogy which goes with it which gets every young person and every adult returnee back and up to a level where they get effectively ... The English and maths GCSE do not need to be GCSE but to be something which is clearly recognised as difficult, as reputable, as much a piece of evidence of real skills as the traditional academic way of getting that. I actually think that if you could do that for every young person, you would have created a revolution in your citizenry and not just in your workforce. Those are the real skills of the modern world and if you have those then the other gateway is open. There are lots of ways you can do that and you do not have to turn everything into a vocational GCSE in which you then tick off punctuation or addition or things like that. Mr Humphries: I would agree with that entirely. The problem is that what we teach is the English GCSE. What we do not teach, or necessarily align completely with the English GCSE, are the applied capabilities which are associated with language and the use of language. It is the most important communicative device we have, but a large part of the young curriculum in English is nothing to do with the ability to communicate, it is not to do with listening, it is not to do with communicating a message, it is not to do with debating, it is not to do with oral communications, it is not to do with written communication, it is to do with the grammar, it is to do with the association of words, it may be to do with the study of literature. Q22 Helen Jones: I am not sure that is correct. As a former English teacher there is an awful lot in the English curriculum which is to do precisely with looking at, listening, with --- Mr Humphries: But it is not examined. Q23 Helen Jones: It is examined; writing in practical situations is examined. I take your fair point. We have to answer it from where we are and not where we were back perhaps 25 years ago. Mr Humphries: It goes a little bit further than that. Talk to the young people who drop out of English, the young people my institution tends to pick up who come out with poor GCSEs and poor maths, often with no results or with very low grades in a few subjects. The biggest thing they talk about is the sense of a lack of purpose in the learning they did. Purpose in that context is about the meaningfulness of it to them: not to the system, not to the teacher, not to the school but to them. It is the most common cry you get when you pick up young people who have been failed by the system and it is the meaningfulness of what they experienced which is the problem for them. Yet they know that they need to communicate effectively, they know they need to be able to argue for their outcomes, they know they need to be able to use language and mathematics in all its forms effectively. They suffer and they are very aware of the consequences of suffering caused by their inability to use numbers effectively and the exclusion that produces for them in the labour market. They will say that what they did not get out of their school environment was something which ended up being meaningful for them. We have been doing that consistently for a long time. Whatever happens we have never bettered 50 per cent of young people coming through GCSEs at the level we expect them to and there has to be a genuine question about the extent to which what they have experienced is meaningful and appropriate for the needs they have at the time. Q24 Jeff Ennis: Turning specifically to the Government's Skills Strategy White Paper, this sets out five key themes. If you had been writing the strategy, would these five key themes have been your five key themes? Do you want me to run quickly through them? Putting employers' needs centre stage; helping employers use skills to achieve more ambitious longer term business success; motivating and supporting learners; enabling colleges and training providers to be more responsive to employers' and learners' needs; joint government action in a new skills alliance. Mr Humphries: When I do a presentation on this issue, which I do regularly, I usually have a list of eight rather than five. I will not go through it, but it is a presentation I think members of the Committee have seen. It does start from a focus on adults, because the skills strategy is very much focused on adults. It talks about the need to understand the needs of the adult and engage with them effectively. That incorporates in it the need to ensure that those people for whom a system may have failed need access to information, advice and guidance which help them make informed decisions. One of the problems we know happens when you are dealing with adults is that even if one does persuade them to engage in learning, getting them engaged in stuff which actually meets the requirements they have identified is quite difficult. Engaging with the individual would be a key part of it. We do know as well that when one is working with adult learning programmes which successfully engage with both the individual and their employers, assuming they are in the workplace, they are more successful than those which engage with the individual alone. We are seeing it again in the employer training pilot. Engaging with employers, not determining what they have to do but engaging employers in that process would for me be a second critically important part. The qualification framework would be for me a third one and that system is no longer fit-for-purpose. There are several propositions. City and Guilds have produced their own paper on what we believe that should look like and making that meaningful, simplifying it and making sure that the qualifications are coherent. The very fact that a level 2 in key skills and a level 2 which is a sort of full technical certificate in electrical installation are the same thing is just nonsense. Clarifying that so it is comprehensible would be a third one. For me the fourth one would be about addressing the most important priorities first. As someone who both wrote skills task force reports and has been heavily involved with the Government's development skills strategy I have had a key part in developing the proposition around entitlement. Why is that important for me at this stage? Because I think there is simply too large an adult cohort which has been excluded from learning for too long, so we need to put a priority behind getting them all up to a level which enables them to start and equips them for entering the workplace. I put a fourth one there. Undoubtedly I would say the provider base and that getting the provider base to face off and meet the requirements of the employers and the individuals is an important one. The thing which is too often left out in that is the recognition that innovation is an incredibly important part of that, otherwise you cannot meet the diversity of needs of an extraordinarily diverse population. I would certainly be looking at the whole extent to which we measure and manage it appropriately, for all the reasons we highlighted earlier. Would there be a huge difference between us or would we end up describing the same set of priorities in slightly different words and by grouping in different ways? There is greater commonality between my ambitions and the strategy than there is difference. Professor Wolf: The real problem is that they are issued as White Paper objectives. How can one disagree with motherhood and apple pie? What I really looked for there and did not find was a really clear set of reasons why we need it. There were one or two things buried in there but not at that level. Q25 Chairman: You are being rather polite there. I get the impression, reading your material that actually, what you really believe is that we have tried all this before, we have had these grand plans, we have had NTOs and we have had Learning and Skills Councils, we used to have TECs and there has been a lot of government apparatus and it still has not delivered. In a sense there seems to be a question mark in what you write: why should this be any different from what preceded it? Professor Wolf: Yes, that is a fair comment. I suppose I am realistic enough to feel that no government at this point in its term of office is suddenly going to turn around and tell me that all the things they did about three years ago have not been working very well. Q26 Chairman: It is worse than that. In your writing you are saying that everything happened under the last five regimes, whether it was Margaret Thatcher or John Major or the present one. Professor Wolf: Not everything. It is true that in order to have a reasonable read - and it is terrible if people have not read me - I of course concentrate in particular in the area of training and skills on things which did not work because that was after all what I was trying to develop. Q27 Chairman: You did say it did not work under any administration. Professor Wolf: I do indeed say it did not work under any administration and I have said earlier that what I do feel increasingly strongly rather than decreasingly strongly is that individuals are better judges of what they want than governments can ever be, whether these are in Whitehall or at a local LSE level. Therefore, if I were asked to write a document of this type, it would be how actually to turn the structure round so that far more of the decision about what you want to learn and the circumstances in which you want to learn it rest with the individual learner. That is not what I would look for at this point in the Government White Paper, which was the question posed to me. Q28 Chairman: There is a smaller voice than government is there not in some of these documents which says give the money, give the incentive to the individual? Individual learning accounts was one of the --- Professor Wolf: Of course and that sits there like a big lump between us and I do not know enough about the history to know whether that was inevitable or not. It may be that it was in fact something where various things which went wrong have actually caused serious problems. Q29 Chairman: I do not want to go off on a tangent there. What I want to keep you on is that one of the alternatives you seem to be articulating, rather than this massive sum of money - and we have the Learning and Skills Council report to Parliament through this Committee - and a massive bureaucracy, an enormous amount of taxpayers' money --- Professor Wolf: Massive; absolutely. Q30 Chairman: You are saying that it would be better if you could give some of that money to the individual to control their own training and skilling. Professor Wolf: Yes, I am. I am also saying that if you have things like, for example, properly constituted awarding bodies, which have independent auditors, which have some government regulation setting the ring around them, if you have those sorts of bodies which are guaranteeing the quality of the measurements and if you genuinely have public sector and charitable organisations delivering the learning - we are not talking about completely doing away with the idea of public service and I want to make that absolutely clear - if you had that, not only would you reduce the bureaucracy, reduce the costs, but in my view, based on looking at what has happened and not merely on arguments from prejudice and first principle, you would get better development of skills and would actually enable the individuals to get what they need and what they want more effectively than we are doing by continuing to tinker at the edges of the current system. Q31 Jeff Ennis: This has been very interesting. Is there a role here for local business/education partnerships to try to act as a catalyst between the individual and the employer? Professor Wolf: There probably is. It is again something I am conscious I do not know enough about, but when I think of the things which have been really effective, they have tended to be locally grown. Leeds is a shining example of stuff which works really well, which actually has partnerships which really involve local business and which is a charitable trust. Yes, it does work and it is partly about scale. It is not that I believe large bureaucracies are in some sense evil in their intent, but when something gets too big and tries to develop everything, it is forced to make rules for everything and before you know where you are, you have a vast bill on your plate. It is about sending the decision-making onto the level, as far as you can, where people are directly involved and getting your safeguards and your accountability through structures such as setting rules for providing awards. I do think that the example which Chris started with, which is that the universities, who have all their problems, but they make awards which people understand and which they accept and the history of awarding bodies such as City and Guilds, which has a strong brand name and high respect, for good reason, indicates that it is possible to have measures which have respect and integrity and value without having to create a vast central planning structure telling individuals what they need. Q32 Jeff Ennis: I do not know whether my final question is controversial or not. The very building block in most areas for delivering mainstream education and level 2 qualifications is the local education authority. As we now have a Department for Education and Skills, is there not a case to look at re-designating local education authorities as local education and skills authorities? Are skills not being undervalued in the education currency at the present time? Professor Wolf: May I think about that one? Mr Humphries: I am not sure skills are undervalued. Q33 Jeff Ennis: No, it is the perception I am talking about. We have the Department for Education and Skills, but we have local education authorities. Mr Humphries: In that sense, yes, why not? Alison's concerns were about more bureaucracy and the issue becomes --- Q34 Chairman: To what extent do local education authorities have a real bite into the skills agenda. Mr Humphries: The reality is: not a lot. At the end of the day it becomes yet another layer between the two people who actually matter in this. There are two people who matter in this: there is the individual who wants the skills and the employer who is going to give them the job for which they are trying to get the skills in the first place. My concern all the way through this is that we are almost trying to put too many layers in the way of a system where actually the critical third party who needs to enter between the individual and the employer is the person who can provide the training or the organisation or whatever it is. The question you would have to ask is: if the aim of the state in all of this is to try to maximise the amount of resource allocated for education and training which actually reaches the ground, reaches the shopfloor, then one should be looking for ways of reducing the scale of intervening bodies and reducing the volume of resource which is put into their roles and looking at how one does it. Individual learning accounts were a very sad example of a good idea and an idea which has been a shared view by both the labour and employer side of the marketplace since 1989 or 1991 when the CBI produced its paper on skills and success - I am trying to think what it was called - when they argued strongly for putting the resource as close as possible to the learner and the employer. It would make an imperfect market better. I would agree with that. The challenge then is to try to place a framework of responsibility around those resources because government, the state, has a role to ensure public funds are properly utilised. To put a smaller framework of controls into place is to make the system work rather than a multilayered one. For me that means looking at the three key players, the learner, the provider and the employer and looking at how we can make that partnership work most effectively. Q35 Valerie Davey: I should like to come back to the entitlement of the young person still at school. It seems to me at that level that we must ensure that young person has the motivation, has the ability to choose, has the skills you defined and they are related to both the curriculum and the method of teaching. I think that is the analysis of what you have been saying. Mr Humphries: Yes. Q36 Valerie Davey: On the curriculum side, we are already saying we will reduce it, so how do you feel about reducing a modern language and design and technology? Secondly, how can we ensure that the catalyst for the kind of experience you have been sharing with us very graphically is enabled by a variety of teaching skills which perhaps the teaching profession is not always deploying successfully? Professor Wolf: I do not want to sit here and design the national curriculum in two sentences; that is the last thing we need. I do also feel that the point where things are most critical, in terms of looking at where young people vote with their feet, has been the first year after that. We have had this huge increase in numbers staying on at 16 and then very, very large numbers leaving again within a year. They have accepted the importance of education and then what they are offered, particularly if they are not in the A level stream or are not coping with it, just does not work. In terms of what we need, that is the number one priority. Within that it is also about ensuring that those who did not reach a critical level of mastery of English and maths - I am going to call it that, why not? - in their GCSE year continue to have ways of really improving those skills and getting reputable alternative certification of them. Re-doing GCSE again and again does not work and we can document that in terms of numbers. I do think that we need to think about where we put limited resources. This is another thing about how much weight you put on examining. My own view is that there is not this importance of differentiating between the core entitlement, which is the one thing you absolutely want to make sure that every young person has and the bits where you can loosen up and allow different schools, different young people, different awarding bodies to make different offers. I suppose that trying almost to rationalise and think the smallest number of awards has to be the best thing is not necessarily correct. People are quite good at finding their way through a supermarket because there are tracks through and you can also find your way through alternative awards in an area in which you are interested. Again, it is about the core which you really have a strong commitment to as a government and things around that. The issue of providing teachers is critical, but it is clearly not the core concern of these discussions as I understand it. It does seem to me to be absolutely central and vital and something which governments the world over tend to duck, because it is expensive and difficult. If we are serious at all about improving the skills of young people and adults, then we have to be infinitely more serious about recruiting and training and retraining and developing teachers than we have been for the last I do not know how many decades. Mr Humphries: If we start from the perspective of the national curriculum, we are starting at the wrong point. It is where we are today. However, if you are asking me what it is that young people should be entitled to as the consequence of their experience and the education system, then you would be better off describing that in terms of what they can understand and do - perhaps "know" is in there somewhere but I do not want to get into too much detail - because that is what they are looking for. At that point you would start looking at areas like language and communication, you would look in detail at their ability to apply mathematical capabilities in a whole variety of situations. That is very different from theoretical mathematics; I say this as a trained maths teacher. It is about the extent to which they can use maths to address real-world problems as they impinge upon them. I think there would be quite a degree of it which is around science for the real world and the extent to which they understand the basic systems, principles, scientific systems and principles which shape the world in which they operate. What they actually knew in an academic sense after that would be for me the icing on the cake. The entitlement is about what it is that they understand and can do as a consequence of their experience in the learning system. That depends very, very fundamentally not just on the curriculum but on pedagogy, on learning styles. I remember being invited to address one of the first conferences of SCAA (QCA was the schools side) long before it became NCVQ and the topic I was asked to address was "What has happened to pedagogy?". I think this must have been 1992, perhaps 1993. The point which was being made at that time was that in fact over the period from about 1985 to the early 1990s we abolished almost every organisation in the UK which was doing research into pedagogy. The curriculum mattered; what was taught, not how it was taught. We abolished the institutions which were doing that: the Schools Council was doing good pedagogical work and the Council for Educational Technology was doing it, the National Foundation for Educational Research was doing it, I could go on. They were all shut; all their pedagogical programmes were shut. Research into how people learn and how we should shape the learning experience to maximise achievement for young people just stopped. Q37 Chairman: What was the period of this? Mr Humphries: You can track it from about 1985 when the changes were first being wrought to the Council for Educational Technology and the Schools Council over that period. Q38 Chairman: Do you concur with this, Professor Wolf? Professor Wolf: I feel at this point I am not in my own area of expertise. Q39 Chairman: It is very interesting, if it is true. We ceased to have an interest in how we teach pupils rather than what we teach pupils. Professor Wolf: Yes. It seems to me to be quite true. What is certainly true, if you look at what we have been occupied with for 20 years, is that it has been defining and re-defining and re-defining qualification requirements and frameworks until they come out of our ears. That is certainly true. Q40 Valerie Davey: What we have done is undervalue the child who learns with their hands, to put it crudely; the children who learn in that different way other than with eyes and ears, those children who need to be tactile. Mr Humphries: It is more than tactile, it is even about the way one groups young people together, gets them working in projects. I was Assistant Director for the Council for Educational Technology until 1988 at the time when all of that remit was taken off. I left it because that remit was abolished and the Council for Educational Technology became entirely about computing; a similar thing with the Schools Council. The question the UK needs to look at is to recognise the amazing work being done in Australia, amazing work being done in America through MIT, through Harvard, through the universities in Australia, who are looking at brain science, development in brain science, learning styles, the whole way in which you shape learning experiences to suit people. With the exception of some honourable programmes in individual universities there is no structured programme on pedagogy left in the UK and yet we are seeking to work in a far more , diverse world. We are trying to meet the needs of the 100 per cent not the 50 per cent, we are working in a world in which technology is transforming practice, it is not the only answer, yet this is the one area where we are woefully inadequate in our understanding. I would never buy in teachers for this. I think we have failed to support teachers and failed to undertake the necessary research and development to enable them. The final thing I would say is that if we look back to the national curriculum, the arrival of the national curriculum led essentially to the abolition, the removal from the bookshelves of almost every piece of learning resource which had existed until then. If it was not stamped "appropriate for the national curriculum" it was simply removed from sale. You may remember some of this at the time. That led to teachers adopting a far narrower range of practices in the classroom because the resources, materials and support were no longer available to them which were supporting that practice. There is a real need for a research institute investigation into pedagogy and learning styles and it is a big lack in our research and development programme. Teachers are not the problem: teachers are the receivers of the system. Q41 Valerie Davey: I must say I am delighted we have that on our record. May I move immediately to something very much more pragmatic? I have not seen some research which has recently been coming out of Bristol which shows that there are some young people there who just do not have currently the link between working hard in school and achieving what they would like to be, that somehow it is luck that the lottery ... It is called the Beckham syndrome. There is no indication about his skill, his time, effort, but somehow you get there. It is a quick jump from where you are and it is luck. That presupposes that we have not actually talked to young people. We have not given them some of the work experience. Are you in favour of work experience during this 14-19 period? How do we make that link between what youngsters are actually doing, giving them motivation to link into what they, as individuals, might like to choose and want to do? Professor Wolf: I am a bit of a sceptic about mandated work experience, I have to say. It seems mostly to come down to whether you have the sort of parents who can find you an amusing week. I am tremendously much in favour of people having experience of working, but that is rather different from inviting schools to devote a huge amount of time to setting up short-term work experience placements which are very expensive to do. You very often find that the young person cannot do anything very useful and then they are supposed to come back and write all sorts of things about it. If you look at the fact that every school has scarce resources, I am not in the least convinced that that is the best way to do it. That is very different from saying that you learn from having experience of work. You do and in terms of looking at what happens to young people, there is also no question that having had part-time jobs or serious chunks of work experience - what the French would call a stage - has tremendously good effects in terms of your longer term employment prospects and everything that happens to you. I am something of a sceptic about mandatory work experience in the school curriculum. Q42 Helen Jones: As the sceptical mother of a teenager who is about to go on work experience and is desperate for us to find him something more interesting, is there any research to show whether this improves people's chances? Professor Wolf: I do not know of any. Q43 Helen Jones: As opposed to getting a Saturday job. Professor Wolf: Exactly. I do not know of any. Mr Humphries: You have just hit on the head there the point about this. Your question is about the current structure of the work experience programme we are offering and whether there is evidence that is the best way to do it. I do not believe there is. Is there evidence that a better understanding of work and adult life is a sound part of the preparation of a young person? I am convinced there is. I do not know the research, but as the parent of two teenagers, boy can I recognise the syndrome as described and I will go and find it. There is an issue here about young people's expectations of life as they are beginning to experience it. I believe strongly that in a curriculum which did have as its core entitlement this preparation for work and adult life, a programme of opportunities to see the world of work as it is could be productive. If you are asking about the current system of work experience, isolated out of a core curriculum, which is around preparation for work and adult life, I am not convinced that we have it right at all. Q44 Valerie Davey: There is now an organisation called SCOOL which is taking all this work away from schools and does all the organisation of getting young people into appropriate work-based learning. Part of that is taken away. I still recognise the problems. Mr Humphries: It is the context which is the issue. Valerie Davey: The context is that youngsters are now finding a different way into work and into work experience than the one you and I thought was appropriate. There are different ways of doing it. Q45 Mr Chaytor: Later this month the 14-19 working group is due to produce its interim report and on the evidence of the document they put out in the autumn it is going to focus on the changes to the curriculum which would be built on a balanced curriculum with general, specialist and supplementary elements. Secondly, it is going to propose a form of overarching diploma at the end of the school career. I am curious to know first of all what you think about the curriculum and whether that framework of general, specialist and supplementary studies makes any sense at all. If it does, what would you like to see within each one? We have talked about maths and English, but we have not talked very much about IT as a core skill. Mr Humphries: I would go back and re-define Tomlinson slightly differently. I sit on a sub-group of Tomlinson and we have been looking at what is in the core in a sense in Tomlinson's terms. He talks about the core and then the subjects around the edge. For me, that core is the critical issue and getting that right is the fundamental one. It is much easier to think about how you can extend the core to address the particular issues associated with subjects which might be of interest to that young person and how you create subject curricula around the edges of the core. For me the question we have to get right is what is in that core and how it differs from what the current system delivers to young people. I think it is intended to be much of what we were describing earlier, preparation for work and adult life. In a sense the principle behind it says that if every young person has that, it is far less important which particular subjects they choose, because they are less likely to narrow their choices at too young an age. For me, if Tomlinson is to address the key needs, it has to address that fundamental core and get it right, that foundation, preparation for work and adult life, it has to provide a good, rich diversity of options for the young person to assemble around it. It needs to recognise the fact that if you have a core then the fact that I happen to be interested in design and technology or foreign languages is much more of a choice for me. For me, the other thing which would have to be in that core - I think I am a lone voice in pleading for the third element - is language and communication in English and the ability to communicate effectively in the society in which you operate. The second one is the ability to apply quality mathematical concepts to real world problems. The third one is a practical understanding of the impact science has on the world in which you have to live. IT, for me, is something I would be very unlikely to want to teach as a separate subject unless that young person was at that point ready to begin to specialise, was willing to narrow it down and see it as a specialist subject. IT is a part of the core, it will increasingly be a fundamental competence for living a fulfilled life. It sits for me in the core. If someone wants to pursue it as a specialist subject because that is of particular interest, that is fine, but I would not identify it as something which ought to be deeply embedded in the core. Q46 Mr Chaytor: So you are talking about four elements within the core. Mr Humphries: I would not teach IT as a subject. You will be using IT from age two probably all the way through in a structured way; it would almost come through the pedagogy, the learning style, the way in which you learn. IT would be ubiquitous in the experience you would have. In developing maths and the mathematical capability I believe the context is important; people have to be able to understand how to apply mathematical knowledge to the solution of real world problems and that requires structured teaching in a different way to IT. Professor Wolf: It is hard to comment on Tomlinson because it is really devil-in-the-detail stuff. Until we find out what the core is, we do not really know whether there is going to be any major change in the current sixth form, which is where the major changes might come. We have talked about two areas: the need to re-think the curriculum for those who are not doing well at GCSE and then dropping out after it; also the whole issue of the curriculum for those who are staying on. I should like to say just a little bit about that for a change because it is highly related to skills. If we do not actually make any major changes in the sixth form curriculum, we are going to continue having serious skills shortages in maths and quantitative areas. That seems to me absolutely clear. We also currently have a situation in which it is still true that many people are doing very little serious writing and not that much serious reading in the final years of full-time pre-tertiary education. There really is an issue here and whether or not we are going to do anything serious about this is not clear from the things I have seen so far. There seem to me in particular to be some slightly worrying indications that there is not going to be any knock-on effect on university degrees. If that is true, then it means there cannot be any serious changes in the school curriculum either. This is very much a personal view, but it is related to what we know about skills. I really do think that it is time not merely to give this clear entitlement in what I call maths and English - and I should be happy to include science as well - among those who are not doing well, but also to insist that is part of your core education right the way through to 18. If we are not prepared to do that and to seize it, then we are basically playing games. That has major implications. If we do not do that, then none of it will really happen. This comes back to the whole issue of how you run a school or how you run an FE college. You can talk about core options until you are blue in the face, but they remain notional unless you have large enough groups for it to be financially viable to provide them. That means that unless you have quite a restricted range of options which you are bound to do, but which do not include the ones you would like people to do from a skills point of view, where you actually say everybody has to do some of this, you will just end up with it being a notional possibility that nobody actually does. It does seem to me that where we can say not that we are short of level 2 or level 3 qualifications, but we are actually short of skills, there is a very strong argument for insisting that all our young people continue to do some very serious mathematics of very different types - not all of them doing AS maths, clearly not - and introduce some serious engagement with the English language. I should also be very happy if they had some serious engagement with science, but that is less of a skills and more of a citizenship issue. I should also like to say that I agree IT is not a separate subject. It is also less and less of an issue for young people anyway. There may be some cases where you need to give remedial or intensive help to kids who have not had the access or who for some reason has not learned to do it lower down the school, but if you talk to anybody running an FE or a sixth form college, they will say that the incoming skills of their students in IT are not an issue. Mr Humphries: In the skills task force reports in 1998 to 2000 mathematics and the need for mathematics was one of the biggest single issues we highlighted and I would agree entirely with Alison. From my point of view, the only solution to that is not to make it current maths as we know it but the mathematical capability that we have been describing - we said it then and I believe it now - should be a compulsory part of the school curriculum for a young person, in the core. Q47 Mr Chaytor: How does that relate then to the overarching diploma? Unless at the age of 18 or 19 students do not achieve in mathematics, they do not get the overarching diploma? Professor Wolf: If there are no teeth, it is meaningless. If it is yes, it would be nice, but you do not really have to have it, then people will not have it. Q48 Mr Chaytor: You have argued for changes to the curriculum, but you have also been critical of teaching hairdressing and bricklaying to fourteen-year-olds. Where are you pitching your changes to the curriculum? You want to get away from a curriculum dominated by three traditional academic subjects at A level, but you do not want hairdressing and bricklaying for fourteen-year-olds. Professor Wolf: You would not teach bricklaying to fourteen-year-olds. Q49 Mr Chaytor: Why not? Professor Wolf: Because it is too early for them. Q50 Mr Chaytor: Surely it is useful to know how to lay a brick or build a wall, regardless of whether you want to become a bricklayer. Mr Humphries: What are you teaching, is the question? If what you are seeking to do is to give them an understanding of some of the range of capabilities and experiences which work in the construction sector may offer, then it seems to me to be quite a legitimate thing to be doing and building into young people's curricula at some appropriate stage in their development; your original point about why are we talking about 14-19. To make that option available to them is very, very sound. That is very different from expecting to produce the skilled output of a bricklayer from that young person because you are doing two things: one is that you would have to take up so much of the curriculum time that you would be automatically narrowing their choice and that is a very bad thing to do at age 14. Equally, you are assuming that they have sufficient understanding of a range of choices available to them to begin to narrow down in that depth. It seems to me that you provide vocational experience almost at the broad industry sector level as a part of the options which are available surrounding the core, but you do not assume that suddenly you are going to complete your modern apprenticeship by the time you are 161/2 because you have narrowed the choices available to you to such an extent that you can actually give that amount of time to that subject. Q51 Mr Chaytor: I see the distinction. What I am trying to bring out is: how is it different to teach someone to model with clay as against teaching someone to build a little wall? Clay is art and it is culture. Mr Humphries: It is not. Professor Wolf: I do not think it is. Q52 Mr Chaytor: It is perfectly legitimate to teach them how to build a wall. Mr Humphries: Certainly. Professor Wolf: Oh, yes. Q53 Mr Chaytor: As long as you are not trying to teach them to be a bricklayer. Mr Humphries: Yes. Professor Wolf: It is also about schools and colleges doing what they are able to do well and not being expected to do far more than they can possibly do. Q54 Mr Chaytor: May I ask briefly about assessment? What changes to the assessment regime within the emergence of an overarching diploma and the structure of the assessment would you like to see? Professor Wolf: This is a completely personal view. It goes back to this business of measurement and the fact that doing assessment well is expensive and that only a limited number of qualification or assessment occasions are ever going to have broad recognition and credibility. I have absolutely no idea what the final outcome will be from the whole Tomlinson process but it does seem to me that one of the few things everybody agrees on is that we are over-assessing and spending so much time and effort on assessment that it is out of proportion to the game and threatening the quality. My own preference would be to concentrate. We should not get rid of GCSEs, they have clear labour market value and recognition. It comes back to the same story I have been trying to tell all evening, which is that there are key areas where you want to know how people are doing. You should concentrate your externally regulated and funded resources on those and not worry too much about the others. In that sense it is again a core and periphery, without wanting to go into the detail. The same is true later: you do not need to assess and record everything that moves. You need to decide that there is a limited number of things that you do want to do and then you measure them properly. Mr Humphries: Allow me to pick that up outside the 14-19 context. I would not disagree with Alison inside the 14-19 context. If one is talking not about the young person who is touching hairdressing or plumbing or English literature in its 14-19 curriculum but who has made a decision that they wish to move down a particular occupational or vocational route - this is a critical issue for the skills strategy - then at that stage the fundamental thing which is contained in the skills strategy around vocational qualifications and assessment has to be the principle of fitness for purpose. We have almost strangled our vocational qualification system at the moment by all sorts of hard, fast and quite unjustified rules about what are and are not acceptable forms of assessment. We have defined one of our qualifications as predicated upon the only form of assessment being observation of competence called an NVQ, yet we have known for years that any sensible qualification which seeks to develop the broad range of skills required for an occupation is likely to involve some degree of knowledge and understanding, some degree of competence, some degree of synoptic assessment, the ability to take all the different bits learned together and solve an overarching problem. What we have defined out of our vocational qualification system is fit-for-purpose assessment. If we are going to go down that route within the unitised credit framework, the proposition in the skills strategy, then we need a single qualification system and the acceptance that within any particular qualification the range of assessments which will be needed should be appropriate, should be fit for purpose and in terms of external assessment probably do not need to be much more than about one third of the total assessment of people's experience. At the moment our system is built upon distrust. It is built upon the belief that the only way to be sure is to not trust the lecturer and to put in place external assessment regimes and then audit regimes on top of audit regimes to check the assessment, upping the cost and fundamentally compromising a system which employers are now walking away from. There are some radical needs for real changes in the assessment regime, in vocational qualifications too. My hope is that the projects described in the strategy will help us get there. Q55 Mr Chaytor: Does a unitised system of assessment invalidate the continuation of GCSE at 16? Professor Wolf: No. At this point in a sense one really is trying to grope in the dark. If you are really seriously talking about going down a unitised system where everything gets recorded, we had better start building vast systems now to record every unit which every individual is going to get across their lifetime and put towards a diploma or not put towards a diploma. These are major decisions which it is not clear to me the Tomlinson group has made one way or the other. My own feeling is that greater things have been expected of unitised systems than they have delivered, but most people on the whole are not interested in knowing whether you have a unit of this and a unit of that. Maybe we should relax a bit about it. If we are seriously going to do it, then we had better start building the systems now. Q56 Mr Gibb: This has been a fascinating session and I have learned a huge amount. I was very interested in both your theses that what we need is a better teaching of the basic academic skills of maths, English, science. That presumably means a tailored curriculum to deal with the lesser achieving 50 per cent we have been talking about. How will you teach a tailored curriculum to a mixed ability class? Or are you saying you need to get rid of mixed ability teaching and have comprehensives? Mr Humphries: I do not know the full answer. Let me go back and just describe something which was quite successful in the 1980s and early 1990s to a degree, which was around a programme which used to be called supportive self-study. Teachers from the period may remember it. The principle of this was to say that if you seek to lay down a fairly standardised approach to teaching and learning across a whole institution it becomes very difficult to meet the needs of the individual. If you are going to seek to meet the needs of the individual, you almost have to restructure completely and entirely the organisation of the school day. You cannot just tinker; you have to invert the system. Quite a lot of work was done there about the extent to which supportive self study techniques, which could enable the able individual to work in a rich resourced environment, which provided support tools - and actually some of the new developments in technology are fantastic in terms of this - do not substitute for the teacher, but enrich and enhance the learning experience. If you actually invert the day and then see the teacher as a resource to be used by individuals, you can release a lot of teaching time to focus on the less able because the more able are working in this environment. Q57 Mr Gibb: How can you do that? You said you want a tailored curriculum, so you are talking about trying to teach different tailored curricula in the same classroom. Is that what you are trying to explain? Mr Humphries: No, I am saying you change the nature of the organisation of the day. You do not work in serried classroom ranks in strictly focused lessons. You work much more akin to the structure of a college or even the early stages of university where you have some lectures with quite large groups, you will have small tutorial groups, you will have projects which young people will go away and work in small groups or teams on. For those who are less able to work in such a flexible environment you have more teaching resource available. Q58 Mr Gibb: It sounds like the sort of school Princess Margaret would send her children to. Professor Wolf: I am less ambitious. I just think that there are some things which it is quite easy to teach a mixed ability group and there are other things where it is really very difficult. The further up the school you get and the more you have different people following different curricula, the more you are going to have different groups in different classes. I agree with your first question which says that if you are teaching a tailored curriculum and people are doing different things, quite often they are going to be in different groups to do it. Again it is the difference between talking about fourteen-year-olds, which is the point at which I get very unhappy about people losing large chunks of the mainstream curriculum because then it is very hard to come back in again, and teaching sixteen- or seventeen-year-olds. By that point in any system I know, including some of the systems which have done the best job so far of having alternative ways of delivering the core skills, yes, you get different groups in different classrooms, but it is more a question, in old-fashioned jargon, of setting rather than streaming and that is what you have to do. It comes back to my original point that you always have to limit the choices because you cannot afford to have 15 options if you only have 100 in the year group. You do not have the staff, you do not have the space and you do not have the materials. Yes, that is exactly what you are doing but you are always doing it backwards. You want to try to keep people together for as long as possible, because it is important for motivation, it is important for not cutting off opportunities. You also want people to be able to learn and that can push you the other way. You cannot make a shibboleth of either not having mixed ability or having mixed ability; it depends. I am looking at the ex teachers or teachers here. Helen Jones: As an ex teacher, may I put on the record that every group is mixed ability. Q59 Mr Gibb: There is a deliberate decision to mix the abilities from bottom to top in one classroom which is what is happening in about 62 per cent of lessons in Britain today according to Ofsted. It is true, I will send you the figures. It is appalling. You have both been very, very critical of the education system. Why have we reached the position we have with our education system where the core skills are so badly taught? Also, a question for Professor Wolf in particular, do you think if we did have a better general education system that would then lead to miraculously solving the 90,000 shortage of plumbers? Is there a direct link between our specific skills shortages and the poor general education? Professor Wolf: If you have a good education system you will train plumbers a lot more efficiently when it becomes very profitable to become a plumber, which it has now become. Having a good general education system always is important but it never solves all the problems. The lack of plumbers has not just been because of things to do with the education system. I am just slightly concerned that I appear to have given a completely negative view of what is going on in education. Clearly we were asked questions about the things we wanted to change and not the things we did not want to change. That is not the impression I would want to leave. There are areas where, there is absolutely no question, we have not done a good job, but also areas where we have done a good job. A lot of what is going on in primary schools is absolutely excellent and I assume part of the mixed ability numbers must come from that. Q60 Mr Gibb: No, purely comprehensive schools. Professor Wolf: Also because I agree that any class is mixed ability. Somebody teaching maths at Trinity College Cambridge still has mixed ability. There are many good things happening. For example, many of the subject associations in secondary schools have had a fantastically positive effect on much of the secondary curriculum in this country. To talk about other things I wish they could throw in: I wish they could have more impact again. Clearly a lot of the academic teaching at sixth form level is also excellent. There are lots of things which we should not throw away and one of the things we should also be very aware of is something where we have a very good record in this country and have had a very good record and that is of allowing second chances. Perhaps I can take the opportunity to get this on record. One of the things which worries me about some of the trends at the moment is that we may be becoming more like our European neighbours, where it is very hard, once you have made a decision and you are on a track either to change track or, if you fall off, ever to come back again. This relates to the issue of whether we are looking at 14-19 and FE together. There is a real danger there. No, there are things which are seriously wrong and, coming back to your question about plumbers, the standard of the basic education of a country is something which its government must indeed take very, very seriously because it impinges on all other aspects. Q61 Mr Gibb: I wonder how we got where we are today. Why are our literacy and mathematical skills so poor? All the mathematics statistics show that it is very, very poor compared with other countries. Professor Wolf: There is of course a question about the exact levels and somebody mentioned the issue of basic skills levels. You may know, since it is now public knowledge, that the original international adult literacy survey from which we get these figures showed the French to be so infinitely much worse than us that the French Cabinet had an emergency meeting and pulled the results. You have to ask a little bit about what exactly is being measured, how far it is a problem of measurement, how far it is that we are looking for skills which in the past we did not look for. The question is perhaps not so much how we got there but how we did not realise that we needed to do more. I have no evidence which would show that the average literacy levels or the distribution of literacy 50 years ago was much greater across the population than it is today. It is as much about failures of omission as of commission. This circles back to my own particular concern: perhaps one of the problems is that in modern government we try to do so many things so actively that we get lost in endless small reforms and lose sight of big pictures. It seems to me that the big picture for a government in education is ensuring that all its citizens have the major, central, important skills - I do not think I would want to call them basic skills - that they need for the sort of economy and the sort of country and the sort of life that they want citizens to have. Mr Humphries: We have to be very careful. You have heard us making all sorts of statements about the education system, but remember what we have been talking about - and we have been pretty universal between us in terms of talking about exactly the same thing. We have an education system which is serving around 50 per cent of the population incredibly well. It is the reason still that our education system is the envy of much of the world. It is the reason why the UK is probably the number one country whose advice is sought on educational developments by countries around the world. In terms of vocational education, believe it or not, we probably get asked as a country for more advice for other countries on vocational education than even countries like Germany and Austria and the Netherlands, who supposedly have the system which is envied. My concern has been the other 50 per cent. Look at our HE results; they are fantastic. Our universities are envied. Do not misinterpret what I have been saying; I think Alison might well say the same. What we are talking about is the other half of the system and doing for the 50 per cent which is currently not well served, the job we have done for the first 50 per cent. I am certainly not here shooting wildly. Q62 Mr Gibb: My question was why? Why are the 50 per cent performing so badly? What has caused that? Mr Humphries: I would argue that we have done it because the fundamental design of the system, which has actually changed very little in many ways since 1944, has always been to act as a filter to identify those who will go on to higher education. You asked the question about plumbing as well and whether this is anything to do with plumbing. I do not think it has anything to do with plumbing at all. As the awarding body which trains all the plumbers, I can assure you that there is no risk of us having a shortage of plumbers any more when I look at the number of students involved in plumbing. In fact what I am concerned about is the fact that we may have far too many people with plumbing qualifications and not enough work to go round if they all come out the other end. What happened was not the fact that the education system did not equip people, but society's expectations and blatant prejudice, as well as views about what leads to good futures, say academic good, vocational bad. Young people started walking away from engineering and construction in all sorts of ways from the early 1980s onwards. What happened was that suddenly someone noticed that there really is a relationship between skill shortages and salaries and that it was becoming reflected in plumbing and young people started voting with their feet and going into plumbing in September 2001 on a scale you would not believe. The market began to work just slowly and painfully against a backdrop of society's expectations and attitudes which said vocational poor, academic good. What we are beginning to see is that young people, perhaps faster than their parents or indeed policymakers, are beginning to see the way in which market really works and are voting with their feet. What we have to do is recognise in our education system that the choice of plumbing is as valid a choice as law or medicine and that we need them just as much as we need the others and begin to create a society in which young people hear us say that, see us say it, see politicians say it, see the media say it and see salaries and investment in the education system designed to produce plumbers as valued as the investment in the education which produces lawyers. I think it is prejudice which has got us where we are. Chairman: We have had a very good session. We have kept you here for over two hours. We have ranged but we have also got under the skin of the whole subject, for which I am very grateful. I am grateful for that last word on plumbers. He is not here today, but there will be singing and dancing in St Albans at the news. That is an in-committee joke. It has been a very good and very serious session; we enjoyed it and we have learned a lot. We know where you live, so we might be in communication again. If you feel there is something that you wanted to say to us - this is a serious inquiry, we are going to do it very well - we should be very grateful for anything you think you missed saying to us and you know where our special advisers live too. Thank you. |